Tag Archives: Eve Arden

It’s not that anyone is going to complain, mind you. But maybe, just maybe, network radio’s most beloved high school English teacher might be even more of a hit—even allowing that television is now cutting radio ratings severely—with a slightly more advantageous scheduling.

Since luring Amos ‘n’ Andy and Jack Benny from NBC, CBS has built a formidable Sunday night lineup. Putting Eve Arden’s cheerfully sardonic but hopelessly romantic English teacher on Sunday night at 6:30 p.m. after Our Miss Brooks spent 1948 rounding into shape didn’t exactly get her suspended from school—she finished 1949-50 with an 11.0 Hooper, enough to secure her seventh place on Sunday night—but CBS could have provided her a powerful choice of lead-ins.

Following the money is easier, probably, than following a paper trail of Harriet Conklin’s secret admirers:

Nasal Walter (Richard Crenna) is glum because paramour Harriet (Gloria McMillan) has been receiving anonymous love poems. Three suspects emerge surprisingly enough, with three different such poems going to three wrong recipients . . . and Harriet herself thinks one wrong sender is her secret admirer. Hint: he’s recently, and conspicuously enough, borrowed a copy of Cyrano de Bergerac from the Madison High library.

Two days in November. The perfect palliative for electoral hangovers, considering that, the way we got blitzed with political ads this time around, oh brother did we need a drink—even before we went out to vote, if we did . . .

One pretty teenage student at Madison High often finds her allegiance to her favourite English teacher is tested only too often by her imperious, pompous principal father. But if Gloria McMillan’s Harriet Conklin will come to seem like the least immediately remembered or appreciated figure among Our Miss Brooks‘s company, when the show graduates from fixture to memory, McMillan herself may yet prove the company’s most appreciative, never forgetting what the series star teaches her as a mentor, castmate, and friend above all.

In one of his classic broadcasts during World War II, Edward R. Murrow—whose habitual flying aboard bombing runs, married to his legendary rooftop reporting of the earlier London Blitz, prompts many at CBS to wonder if their champion news leader has a death wish—flies such a run during the Allied invasion to liberate the Netherlands from the Nazi grip.